Travessias (Aug 2016)
The reality knocks the door: the confrontation among teacher’s instruction, society’s speech and the multilingual classroom reality
Abstract
It is more and more evident that Portuguese teachers live a dilemma in the classroom: on one hand, the society’s rooted belief that the Portuguese teacher must teach “the good Portuguese” or “the correct Portuguese”, directly associated to the standard or “cult” variation, as some prefer to call it. On the other hand, the teacher is daily faced with the reality of the classroom which points to the existence of a linguistic heterogeneity and contradicts the belief of a monolingual nation. Yet, this professional’s former instruction, many times, superficially deals with linguistic heterogeneity – when it does – which collaborates for the Portuguese teachers’ feeling of doubt: after all, “which Portuguese is it to be taught”? It is in the middle of this conflict that the teacher experiences a constant process of professional identity construction, distressful in many times. The present article does not aim to present definite solutions; instead, its proposal is to discuss the language teacher’s former instruction with focus on the linguistic heterogeneity found along his training period at college and consequently professional life, considering his/her process of professional identity construction. The theoretical discussion is based on readings about identity (HALL, 2000), language and tongue conceptions (PERFEITO, 2007; CÉSAR; CAVALCANTI, 2007), linguistic heterogeneity in classroom and teacher’s instruction (BAGNO, 2009; BRASIL, 1998, OLIVEIRA, 2008; SIQUEIRA, 2012).
